Summary

More than meets the eye?

The Good

Finally the chance to play a modern version of Transformers and also being able to play as Decepticons no less. The idea of flying around as Starscream or Blackout and destroying the military out to stop you or playing as Barricade and tearing the suburban streets up is a blast. Playing the as the Autobots is just as much a blast, even though you are discouraged destroying anything but Deceptions in your path, there really is no punishment to it.

The ability to destroy anything is very fun, firing missiles into the sides of buildings, picking up and throwing various items, such as cars and buses and even using lamp posts as baseball bats, even picking up the Transformers you fight and throwing them into buildings and even explodeable objects, sending them flying through the air. One cool little thing I really like is when you are traveling at high speeds with Bumblebee or Barricade, you can transform in mid-run and slide across the ground in robot form like Starscream did in the movie.

The Bad

There is a lot not to like about this game, the graphics are ok, standard to a rush movie-to-game title, some glitches are easily noticeable and collision detection is a problem sometimes, almost like you are hitting an invisible walls sometimes.

Even though the back of the cover says you can play an army of Transformers, it is far from the fact. You can play as Optimus, Bumblebee, Ironhide and Jazz, but for some odd reason you can't play Ratchet. Likewise, on the Deception side you can't play as Bonecrusher or Brawl, two of the biggest and destructive ones out there, besides Megatron and Starscream. They're are a horde of "drone" Transformers roaming around, but it seems like they were put in the game only for Hasbro to have any excuse to make more toys.

With only five sections of the games to play, it seems very limited, you can only play that Transformer assigned to that area, so you won't be able to play Starscream on another level besides the second military base. You can play other Transformers on different missions in that level, letting you roam around and collect energon cubes to unlock bonuses. However, once you complete the chapter, you can no longer roam that area with the second Transformer, example: on the SOCCENT Military Base, you can play as Blackout, on a mission you can play as Scorpinok, after you finish the mission you can roam around the area, but once you finish the chapter and come back later, you can play his mission again, but afterwards reverts back to Blackout, so collecting all the energon cubes at that time is crucial.

The plot of the game follows the movie, somewhat, even though they use Shia Lebouf and Megan Fox's voice, they have very cheesy voice acting and instead of using movie clips of the movie, they made their own CG clips that have different variations of the movie, but also in some explain others the movie didn't cover.

The bonus items you can unlock isn't worth getting excited over, mostly it is artwork, stills from the movies and trailers. However, one thing that is interesting is that you can unlock G1 characters for Optimus, Megatron, Jazz and Starscream, however playing them in a game is strangely weird, almost like playing and 8-bit Mario in Mario Galaxy.

The Bottom Line

This is an OK game, but another rush job to be put out to promote the movie and slap a $50-$60 price tag. If you have a son, nephew or cousin, they'll have hours of fun with it, but I wouldn't pay no more than $20 for it, which is it's going price now. But, for the die-hard Transformers fans or those who can't remember Transformers and was caught up in the buzz for the blockbuster movie (like me), then pass on it.